Day 5: Hooverwood, AXS Mapathon

We started our day volunteering at the Hooverwood Indianapolis Jewish Adult Day Care Center. We were able to meet and interact with the wonderful residents there while playing everyone's favorite classic game, BINGO! The residents were really excited to play; in fact, they were cheering BINGO before the game even began, practicing their cheers early! It was so amazing that all the residents left as winners! They received chocolate kisses from us and got tickets to be used to redeem at the gift store. One resident, Miss Mamrie, was so excited to get her prize, winning 6 tickets in total, asked me to go with her to the gift shop right after the game was over. She was extremely happy with the peanut butter snacks, that I got to help her pick out! Another resident, Miss Rosie, was extremely sweet to us volunteers. Instead of keeping the prizes she won for herself, she insisted that we have the chocolate kisses and the tickets. I loved the kindness in all the residents there!

After volunteering at Hooverwood, we went to the Indianapolis Arts Museum to explore the sculpture garden. We saw many different interesting artworks, including the skeleton sculpture (featured in the movie The Fault in Our Stars!) and the infinite amount of signs artwork (featured in the picture below). Overall, it was a great quick 45- minute visit in the garden, even if we came out drenched from being caught in the rainstorm.

To end our day, we explored the downtown area of Indianapolis to complete the AXS Mapathon. Here, we focused on visiting restaurants and businesses around this area to figure out how accessible each were for customers with disabilities. From this Mapathon, we discovered that majority of the places allowed guide dogs and had very wide spaces, and no stairs, for wheelchairs. Lastly, an employer we interviewed informed us that there were handicap parking spaces found on all corners of the streets in the entire state of Indiana. After completing this activity, I believe I will be much more aware of the structures of buildings around campus in accessing the students with disabilities. It was great to know, especially in the city area of Indiana, that majority of these restaurants and businesses were able to accommodate to those needs. Finally, we finished our night with some delicious ice cream from downtown. It was great that we were able to fit in all these informing and fulfilling activities in our day!

-Anne Lai